In the new issue of Regulation, economist Pierre Lemieux argues that the recent oil price decline is at least partly the result of increased supply from the extraction of shale oil. The increased supply allows the economy to produce more goods, which benefits some people, if not all of them. Thus, contrary to some commentary in the press, cheaper oil prices cannot harm the economy as a whole.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

But just as very few policymakers are completely good, it’s also true that very few policymakers are totally bad. And a review of fiscal history reveals that FDR and Truman both deserve credit for restraining domestic spending during wartime.

In a new column I wrote for The Hill, I specifically responded to the cranky notion, pursued by Bernie Sanders, the openly socialist U.S. senator from Vermont, that there should be tax hikes on the rich to finance military operations overseas.

The idea has a certain perverse appeal to libertarians. We don’t like nation-building and we don’t like punitive tax policy, so perhaps mixing them together would encourage Republicans to think twice (or thrice) before trying to remake the world.

Earlier this year, President Obama proposed a budget that would impose new taxes and add a couple of trillion dollars to the burden of government spending over the next 10 years.

The Republican Chairmen of the House and Senate Budget Committees have now weighed in. You can read the details of the House proposal by clicking here and the Senate proposal by clicking here, but the two plans are broadly similar (though the Senate is a bit vaguer on how to implement spending restraint, as I wrote a couple of days ago).

So are any of these plans good, or at least acceptable? Do any of them satisfy my Golden Rule?

Here’s a chart showing what will happen to spending over the next 10 years, based on the House and Senate GOP plans, as well as the budget proposed by President Obama.

Keep in mind, as you look at these numbers, that economy is projected to expand, in nominal terms, by an average of about 4.3 percent annually.

The most relevant data is that the Republican Chairmen want spending to climb by about $1.4 trillion over the next decade (annual spending increases averaging about 3.3 percent per year), while Obama wants spending to jump by about $2.4 trillion over the same period (with annual spending climbing by an average of almost 5.1 percent per year).

Senate Budget Chairman Mike Enzi released his budget proposal yesterday afternoon. The request follows yesterday’s proposal from House Budget Chairman Tom Price. The two requests are similar. Both would reduce projected spending by $5 trillion and balance the federal budget over the next ten years. Both budgets repeal ObamaCare, and neither includes reforms to Social Security. The big difference between the two is that the Senate version is even vaguer than the House version.

Like the House budget, the Senate budget includes Medicare reforms. It also includes a proposal that would cut $400 billion from Medicare over the next ten years, matching the level of cuts from President Obama’s budget request in February. The Senate version does not specify how it will cut $400 billion, other than stating that it “does not endorse the President’s specific policy proposals.” The House plan at least it acknowledged how it would reduce Medicare spending (by using a premium support model to generate savings).

The Senate’s defense funding plan is also less clear than the House plan. Both keep the 2011 bipartisan Budget Control Act spending levels for the base defense budget, which is $523 billion for fiscal year 2016. The Senate budget includes an additional $58 billion in “emergency” defense funding, the same amount the president includes. While the House included $90 billion in “emergency” defense funding, the Senate includes a provision that would allow it to establish a “deficit-neutral reserve fund” for further increases in defense spending. That is budget-speak for an undisclosed amount of defense spending hikes, with some sort of spending cut elsewhere in the budget to offset the increase. So while the House plan appears more expensive than the Senate plan, the Senate’s total defense spending level for fiscal year 2016 isn’t obvious and could eventually be higher.

Overall, the proposals from Price and Enzi are similar. As the two chambers reconcile their proposals over the next several weeks, the negotiated budget should provide further insight into Republican spending priorities.

It’s not very often that I applaud research from the International Monetary Fund.

That international bureaucracy has a bad track record of pushing for tax hikes and other policies to augment the size and power of government (which shouldn’t surprise us since the IMF’s lavishly compensated bureaucrats owe their sinecures to government and it wouldn’t make sense for them to bite the hands that feed them).

But every so often a blind squirrel finds an acorn. And that’s a good analogy to keep in mind as we review a new IMF report on the efficacy of “expenditure rules.”

The study is very neutral in its language. It describes expenditure rules and then looks at their impact. But the conclusions, at least for those of us who want to constrain government, show that these policies are very valuable.

In effect, this study confirms the desirability of my Golden Rule! Which is not why I expect from IMF research, to put it mildly.

Back in 2012, I shared some superb analysis from Investor’s Business Daily showing that the United States never would have suffered $1 trillion-plus deficits during Obama’s first term if lawmakers had simply exercised a modest bit of spending restraint beginning back in 1998.

And the IBD research didn’t assume anything onerous. Indeed, the author specifically showed what would have happened if spending grew by an average of 3.3 percent, equal to the combined growth of inflation plus population.

Remarkably, we would now have a budget surplus of about $300 billion if that level of spending restraint continued to the current fiscal year.

Luke Rosiak at the Washington Examiner filed a report late last week on a little recognized, but important congressional practice: proposing open-ended spending. In the last Congress, fully 700 bills proposed spending without limits. That’s a lot.

A quick primer: congressional spending is a two-step process. First, there must be an authorization of appropriations. Then Congress appropriates funds, providing actual authority for executive branch agencies to spend.

The committees in Congress are divided by type between authorizing committees and appropriations committees. Authorizers are supposed to do the bulk of the oversight and authorize spending at amounts they determine. Appropriators would then dole out funds specifically. But over the years, the division of labor has shifted and power has collected in the appropriations committees, whose members are often referred to as “cardinals” … like “College of Cardinals.”

Backward incentives explain this. Members of Congress who authorize spending naturally appear to be pro-spending, which has political costs. The costs are at their worst when a specific amount is involved. “Senator So-and-So wants to spend $50 million on what?!” So many authorizing committees shirk their duties by eschewing reauthorization of the agencies in their jurisdiction. And sometimes the trick is authorizing spending of “such sums as may be necessary,” which doesn’t provide as good an angle for political attack.

That would make appropriators the only drag on spending, but it doesn’t because of a second perversion in politics. Appropriators get good enough at gathering the political emoluments of spending that they overcome the negatives and become an institutional pro-spending bloc. As Mike Franc of the Heritage Foundation put it in 2011, “appropriators, their professional staff, and legions of lobbyists serve as a mutually reinforcing triad bent on increasing spending today, tomorrow, and forevermore.”

Rosiak notes that the House Republican leadership cautioned against open-ended spending proposals at the beginning of the 113th Congress. Consequently, Republican blank-check bills are more rare. The top open-ended spenders are all Democrats, and they’re all on the party’s left wing.

I’ve written before about the propensity of journalists to declare modest budget cuts—or reductions in the rate of growth of government spending—in apocalyptic terms such as “slashing” and “draconian.” I was thus amused by this line in a Washington Post editorial today:

Mr. Hogan is slashing those payments by half, which will mean cuts approaching 1 percent to the school budgets of both Montgomery and Prince George’s counties.

The editorial is generally sympathetic to budget cuts proposed by the new governor of Maryland, and of course the “extra funding from Annapolis mainly to cover higher teacher salaries” may actually be subject to larger cuts. Still, when the impact on the county school budget is “approaching 1 percent,” I’d think “slashing” is, well, overkill.